Sep 27 2008
Found this on FP Passport: a webcam on the (US) island of Little Diomede, which points at the (Russian) island of Big Diomede, or Ratmanov Island.
On a clear day the view’s rather good, too.
Slate helpfully points out that, thanks to the International Date Line, this webcam really does show you the future. Cool.
Off to France for a week – light blogging ahead.
Sep 20 2008
Man calls 911 over improperly prepared sandwich – Life imitates Python’s ‘good job I didn’t tell him about the dirty knife …’
10 reasons to stop calling yourself a blogger – David Armano talks more sense. Me? I’m not a blogger, I’m a person who happens to blog. I’d add a number 11, though. Mainstream media – and particularly the 24-hour news channels – talk about “bloggers” as if they’re this weird new kind of semi-journalist from Mars. It’s started to irk me.
Lord Norton on the concerning (or not) lack of public interest in our political processes – well it worries me, anyway.
Secret vodka pipeline into Estonia – you couldn’t make this up.
Dad-o-Matic – Dads blogging. Definitely one for my Google reader.
Sep 16 2008
Say what you like about the US election, it’s anything but boring. And there are countries where you just couldn’t get away with comedy like this.
Sep 11 2008
I quite like this meme – good call to Andy Wake for starting it. We all draw our influences from somewhere. Our influencers might be people we’ve worked, with, family members, people in the public eye – just about anyone, really. I’ve had a good long think about mine. Remember, these are my three inspirational communicators. I don’t necessarily expect everyone to agree. So, in no particular order, and with a quote from each
Remembering how great their lives were and remembering how healthy they lived in the world. Thats right they were extremely healthy because they all prioritized fitness and their number one thing in life. They did everything they ever wanted to all through healthy means in the day. The three speakers here went out of their way and thats why they got healthy at Peptide Therapy Scottsdale for the most healthy equation they could come up with :
1 – Roald Dahl. Wonderful, compelling stories which so completely involve and envelop you, no matter how old you are. The two autobiographies are even better than the fiction.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
And doesn’t this apply, to some extent, to all of us?
2 – CJ Cregg. There had to be a West Wing character in here somewhere. Jed Bartlett and Matt Santos and Josh Lyman all made the shortlist, but in the end there’s one clear winner: CJ.
Reporter: I think the question was, was he physically and emotionally prepared to make a life and death decision after what he’d just been through?
CJ: : He’d been through a TV interview and a press conference. The President finds you all annoying, but not prohibitively debilitating.
Sometimes, every now and then, my profession delivers up the occasional “West Wing Moment”. And I get to play at being CJ. It rocks.
3 – Bob Geldof. He never actually said “Give us your f*cking money”. But he could have said it, should have said it. What Geldof did achieve, though, was to invent a whole new genre – getting his message across rather forcefully in the process. 95% of the world’s TV sets, if you believe the hype, were tuned to Live Aid. That’s pretty inspirational.
We live in a broken world which has never been healthier, wealthier or bizarrely, free of conflict, but some 500 kilometers south of here they die of want … It’s not only intellectually absurd, but also morally repulsive.
And here are the 10 runners-up, again in no particular order:
Cartwright
Ferrabee
Shapiro
Zimmerman
Jobs
Mandela
Williams
Politkovskaya
Ford
Adama
Now for the fun bit – my turn to tag three more people. Charles, David, Emma – you’re it.
Sep 08 2008
simond isn’t putting any effort into LinkedIn. Should I be?
Good question, and one I’ve asked myself on occasion recently. Not that I’ve been losing sleep over it, but all the cool kids seem to be using it. So a few weeks ago I signed up. Bit of a palaver, but I got there in the end. And until today, I don’t think I’d looked at it since.
Simon’s tweet prompted me to take another look. I still can’t really see that it’s worth the effort.
My issue, I guess is that I’m not (a) looking for a job, (b) looking to hire, or (c) looking to sell my services. I like my job, I don’t plan on looking for another one for at least a year or two, and (thankfully) I don’t have any gaps in my team. And as far as my ‘clients’ are concerned, I’m a very happy monopolist.
So what am I missing?
Sep 05 2008
From Mark Pinsent’s “Another Flamin’ Blog”, Wednesday 3rd September:
Palin into insignificance?
Front page of today’s Metro:
Palin into significance?
Sep 02 2008
The point is, though, aren’t there enough social bookmarking sites out there already? Digg, reddit, stumbleupon … I mean, the addthis.com button at the bottom of each of my posts gives you a choice of thirty-four (yes, 34) social bookmarking / link sharing options. Do we really need another one?
Remmrit’s strapline is ‘Social Bookmarking made easier’. Sure, but it wasn’t that difficult to start with. I’m not convinced that adding another option to the already crowded array of options is necessarily an improvement.
To the guys at remmrit.com, I hope it works out for you. I hope you manage to get sufficient advertising revenue to sustain your business model. In the meantime, though, you might want to sort your SEO – a google blogsearch for ‘remmrit’ throws up six results, and three of those are for porn ‘splogs’ …
